On Friday night I went along to hear Bob Stein speak at Wordpool, an event presented by QLD Writers Centre as part of the 2009 Ideas Festival. Stein challenged the conventional idea of the book, its cultural role and the role of author and reader by focussing his presentation on the central question: What is a book?
In answering the question he began by looking at Copernicus’ book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (“On the revolution of the heavenly spheres”), famously referred to by Arthur Koestler as, ‘the book nobody read‘. This however, was not the case, as when Owen Gingerich, a former astrophysicist at Harvard, had a chance to examine a copy of a first edition of De revolutionibus, he was impressed by its extensive annotations, proving as Stein said, that even in 1543, there were conversations taking place between author and reader in the margins.
It is these conversations that are now commonplace on blogs, social networking sites and e-book readers that are placing author and reader on the same page and transforming the role of the book.
As reading moves from a solitary act to a social act, the book, once viewed as a ‘complete aretfact’, is fast becoming an endless continuum of ideas and discussion.
So just what is a book? This is a question I would love many of you to respond to as we have certainly moved beyond the Merriam-Webster definiton where the book is defined as ‘a set of written, printed, or blank sheets bound together into a volume.’
Look forward to hearing from you…
That’s a long post URL, it only just fit into my Twitter feed. In my mind I like to keep the definition of the word ‘book’ the same as it was, made of paper and able to be carried around. The internet I think of as an infinite multi-dimensional nonlinear completely democratic metatext. Thanks for bringing this discussion out of The Library and into the world it discusses,
Thanks for kicking things off Paul… hope there are many more responses to come!
The book is something you can own. Interpret as you will and keep in whatever place you wish to in your house. No space inappropriate. No room too small.
A book is something you can write your name inside. Lend or not lend.
Scribble comments in – if you are one of THOSE sort of people. Keep in your library forever or put it in the community book sale.
Prop open a door with or stick it under your computer to get it to the right height.
A book offers possibilities. Write to the author. Write a review. Decide if you want to re-read it. There may be no better other things to do.
A book can be big enough to conk you on the head and send you to sleep when you read one in bed, or it can be so slim you can fit it in your handbag, or into your jacket pocket to pull out on the top deck of a cruiser.
A bookshelf of books can kill you if it topples. A book can be arranged in logical visible order with its fellows or lie in scattered piles.
It’s possible, after your parents and best friends die, for a childhood book to be your oldest friend.
A book is something you can write yourself. Or somewhere to find yourself in something someone else has written.
A book can be an inspiration; the source of nightmares; a comfort; a discovery.
A book can be a legacy.
© Beverley George Thanks, Graham, for the prompt. I really enjoyed responding. pls correct any typos!!
Hi Graham, this is great. I like what Paul has said. I think the ‘book’ remains a bound object, and other electronic forms are ‘publications’ perhaps.
I don’t mind the idea of the word ‘book’ coming to mean something that may one day disappear, I think it could be just as useful to use new words for new technologies as re-injecting meaning into old words in order to describe new things, if that makes sense.
What is a book?
A book and its reader are in a relationship. Books are sensual. I love the smell of books, the feel of a book in my hands. I love the act of turning the page and slow caress of the cover when the book and I first meet. I can take time to read a book, stopping anywhere and taking it up again when I choose. I can pore over a particular passage or sentence for as long as I like. I like to get to know a book. Books are in my dreams. There is a sense of belonging – me and the book together. I can curl up in bed with a book and fall asleep embracing it. I can hold a book to my chest and sigh with contentment. Books make me laugh, cry, and everything in between. When books are around me I know I’m home. My books travel with me wherever I go. They are my friends – my constant in life. They are my memories, they are who I am. From my first cloth book when I was a baby, to the book I was reading yesterday, they have defined me.
The conversations between me and the author are not in the margins: instead they are in the content of blogs and networking sites. These conversations can never take the place of the book. My love affair is with the book, not the author. However, I may just share my book with you.
The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Wallace Stevens
This is how I like it!
Maureen Sexton
Thanks for the topic!
Thanks so much for this heartfelt response Maureen. Love that Wallace Stevens poem… the reader leaning late… such a great image. Check out the question at the end of Meg’s comment on this post. Would love to hear your thoughts on that.
For me, the book is an experience of ideas. It is candlelight and comfy cushions, a wild ride, a knotted rope to freedom. It is a place beyond place and time where I can find like minds. So whether it’s a tree-book or an e-book or an open-ended interplay of on-and-offline experiences, it is a book. And if I find like minds in and behind and around the story, it’s a good one.
Bob Stein got me thinking about writers as leaders of research and story-telling, rather than as owners of a finished product: ‘the book’. A community of readers is drawn around the cyber-fire to embellish and guide the tale. Wonderful! But I am left with the access and equity puzzle unsolved: who benefits from the new-look book? Will a class of interwebbed literati leave the rest of the world out in the cold?
Thanks for your response Meg… I plan to publish a collage of the responses soon. The question you pose is a really important one, as the way I see it, working in a number of low socio-economoic areas, the equity and access gap is already widening. I will certainly be including it in the next post to stimulate further discussion.
Pingback: Speakeasy » Blog Archive » Cyber-fires and storytellers…
What a great start for your collage, Graham. I’ve already printed out that poem for my wall.
For more on what is a book, don’t forget artists’ books – a good place to start being here:
http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/
Via here of course
http://ampersandduck.com/art/
Hey Graham: the intellectual debate as to *what* a book actually is indeed interesting theoretical territory; I’d contribute the personal intimation that a “book” is a channel or conduit through which written expression is facilitated; this does not necessarily or exclusively mean that a book is contingent upon pages or even writing, but I’d certainly champion the notion that “writing” (as in the organisation or stratification of language) is both involved and, perhaps controversially, necessary to the book’s composition.
Professional narratologists such as Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida have even coined an especially superlative phrase to apply to the construct of written language: (I’m paraphrasing from memory here, but I’d boil down their philosophical exegeses to:) an organic (linguistic) tissue of citations. A project or philologic event, whereby intertextualities — intrinsic references to other works, other creative texts — are rife, and constitutively make up what we understand a “book” to be. So that’s my little inkling or thinking, but I may yet arrive at a different conclusion, the more I mull the contention over…
Lisette Ogg said:
For me, a book is a rite of initiation. A conduit information, ideas and experience. A transformative tool of humanity, history and change.
there is a great book on this, ‘avatars of the word’ by james o’donnel.
he goes right back in history to look at when they switched from codex scrolls to books and compares the effect of that to the effect of current technology. lots of food for thought.
That sounds like a book I must check out. Thanks for the tip Amelia!